The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of grammar-based university entrance examinations on teaching pedagogy and student learning behaviour in Japanese high schools. 20 high school teachers and 20 high school students completed questionnaires, and follow up interviews were offered to the teachers. The results indicated that the content of entrance examinations seem to be affecting teachers in that they tend to use more classroom time on test preparation than for the development of students’ communicative ability. Similarly the students, who despite showing a strong desire to develop their speaking skills, seem to spend most of their study time memorising vocabulary and grammatical structures for the purpose of improving their scores on these examinations. The results from this study imply that in order for classrooms to become more communicative, a test of communicative ability needs to be incorporated into the existing framework of the entrance examination process.
Keywords: Communicative Language Teaching, Test Washback
